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Sidebar: The Unsolved Murder of Natalya Estemirova

Russia's well-developed security apparatus has the investigative and judicial capacity to prosecute suspects in the 14 unsolved murders of journalists that took place there in the past decade, at least by the account of its own leadership. In a televised announcement in January 2014, Investigative Committee chief Aleksandr Bastrykin boasted that 90 percent of homicides in Russia are solved. It's true that the Kremlin has made progress, though long delayed, with convictions in the case of Anna Politkovskaya. Yet, in other cases where journalists are the victims, investigations have a tendency to taper off, particularly when they point toward politically uncomfortable suspects. Few cases showcase this pattern more than the murder of the prominent human rights defender and journalist Natalya Estemirova.

Three years ago this week, Natalya Estemirova,
a contributor to the independent newspaper Novaya
Gazeta and a local staffer for the Moscow-based rights group Memorial, was
murdered in the North Caucasus, Russia's volatile region, where she was famous
for her work as a defender of human rights.

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Russia's Investigative Committee has named the
main suspects in the October 7, 2006,
murder of Anna Politkovskaya. But the news did not cause a stir. Russian
journalists reacted to it rather languidly; for instance, Novaya Gazeta, where
Politkovskaya worked, did not make any notable comments.

This is not because Politkovskaya's murder--now
five years old--has been forgotten in Russia. The tepid interest is mostly due
to the fact that there are no new names among the suspects.

Two
years ago, as she was leaving home on a hot Wednesday morning in Grozny,
several attackers forced Natalya
Estemirova,
the prominent journalist and human rights defender, into a car. A young witness--who
later fled for fear of reprisal--recalled that Estemirova cried out she was being
kidnapped and that a white Lada sedan then sped off. Estemirova's body was
found a few hours later, ditched along a road near the village of Gazi-Yurt in
neighboring Ingushetia.

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New York, October 6,
2010--Detectives with the federal Investigative Committee, the Russian
agency responsible for investigating serious crimes, say they are probing a widening
circle of suspects in the 2006 murder of Novaya
Gazeta journalist Anna
Politkovskaya.

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New York, July 15, 2010—On
the first anniversary of the brutal murder of prominent journalist and human
rights defender Natalya
Estemirova, the Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Russian
authorities to thoroughly probe professional motives and aggressively pursue
all suspects in the killing. Estemirova, left, who for 10 years documented the human
toll of the conflict in Chechnya, was found shot to death in Ingushetia after
being kidnapped from her Grozny home a year ago today.